A month before the Battle of
Fort Sumter, Simms, in a letter to William Porcher Miles, asserted that the
system that was about to plunge the nation into the Civil War was
misunderstood: “In 1835 I took the
ground, in my pamphlet on the Morals of Slavery, that our Institution was not
slavery at all, in the usual acceptation of the term[…]but that the negro in
the South was a minor, under guardianship[…]was distinctly individualized,
& protected in all his rights & privileges, through a representative
master.”[1] The pamphlet to which Simms referred was Slavery ...